DAP Learning Series: Site Analysis, Live!

Learn how to think about analyzing your site

What we’ll cover today

● We’ll do a live demonstration of a real site analysis - from defining website mission, goals and KPIs to pulling reporting to better understand site performance of specific goals

● Thank you to Dan Friar at the USDA for partnering with the DAP team● The DAP Community can learn a lot from how the USDA is thinking about

their DAP data● We’ll cover how the USDA thinks about their site from a high level strategic

perspective ● Dive into some ideas for how to analyze one specific USDA goal

Before we begin

● This is tough● An hour does not do this process justice● There is no such thing as perfect analysis ● Analytics isn’t accounting● Data is directional● Don’t turn this into an accounting exercise

Our challenge

● Analyzing any site is challenging● There is no one size fits all approach● What might work for USDA might not work work for your site● Google Analytics is a tool that tells you the

○ How○ Who○ What○ But it doesn’t tell you the “Why”

To analyze a site we need to

● Know our website mission, goals and KPIs → this is the most important part of this process - this literally defines the lens through which you understand your site and pull reporting○ Without this, you’ll never be able to pull useful reporting

● Know what types of questions our leadership asks us● Figure out how to pull the reporting to answer our questions, which normally

align with your website goals● Present and communicate data to our leadership team and use data

insights to make strategic decisions

Website mission

● Why does your website exist? ● This is your 30,000 foot view of your site● Think about how you’d explain your website to someone

who’s unfamiliar with Government

Goals

● What are you trying to get your users to literally do on your site?○ Download a PDF?○ Submit a form? ○ Reach a particular URL?

● Goal needs to be SMART - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely

Example of a goal: Increase organic search traffic form submission conversion rate by 5% in Q4 compared to last year

Goals continued

● Goal needs to be SMART - Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and Timely

● By defining your goals up front, you never have to worry about how or why you're pulling pageviews, because you'll be pulling reporting to understand your goals

● Depending on your agency and how your site is structured, you might have many potential goals, but you want to try to narrow it down to a handful of high level goals with success metrics

Example of a goal: Increase organic search traffic form submission conversion rate by 5% in Q4 compared to last year

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

● This is a metric used to assess the success of your goals● Usually a ratio, and usually reported on as some form of conversion rate● For example: Form submission conversion rate tells you the number of

times a form was submitted, divided by the total number of sessions entering your site○ This tells you the percentage share of all traffic that submitted a form on your site

● You can use this conversion rate and then report on past data to understand how your form submission conversion rate performed over time

● You’ll need to do this part in a spreadsheet

Website mission, goals and KPIs

So Let’s talk about the USDA

First, Let’s talk about the USDA’s website mission

The usda.gov website has 18 high level topics from farming and forestry, to opioids and broadband, that are the starting point for our customers to find services and resources from our 29 sub-agencies.

Background:

● USDA site is designed to capture top of funnel traffic via external marketing channels, by leveraging 18 high level topics

● Homepage content changes daily/weekly● Site is promoted via email, social media; organic search drives a large share

of traffic● All sub-agencies live on usda domain, except Forest Service

How do we approach this?

● With so much content and so many sub-agencies, it is critical for the USDA to define specific goals for their site.

● Perhaps each sub-agency might have separate goals

● Important thing here is to just get started, even if you’re unsure about whether you feel confident about the goals you’ve chosen

● So how do we do this?

Before we jump into goals

Remember the mission we just defined:

The usda.gov website has 18 high level topics from farming and forestry, to opioids and broadband, that are the starting point for our customers to find services and resources from our 29 sub-agencies.

● The USDA’s goals should align with your mission and help explain what represents success on your site.

Next, Let’s talk about the USDA’s Goals

Remember - Goals need to be SMART - specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and timely

● Increase traffic to the USDA website

● Increase total traffic by 5% to the “Organic Certified” content topic in order to increase click through rate into “Organic Integrity Database” rate by 2% in October 2019 vs last year

How to think about a USDA Goal

Here’s some background:

● The USDA wants to understand performance and influence of its “USDA Organic” Topic, to provide companies and Farmers information on how to become a certified organic producer

● Let’s take a look at this page

How to think about a USDA Goal Slide 1

Here’s some background:

● The goal of the content is to help companies and farmers learn about becoming certified, and to help those already certified to continue to learn

● One way the USDA defines success is looking at the click through rate into “Organic Integrity Database”, hosted by the AMS on usda.gov

● AMS is subagency - Agricultural Marketing service - they're responsible for labeling - they’re the organic police if people are misusing labels

Why is the Organic Integrity Database important?

● USDA wants its “Certified Organic” farmers and companies to access access and engage with the Organic Integrity Database. This represents success.

● Here you can search and see the status of a farm/business. Farmers and companies can check on their status.

● This database tells you whether a farm/business is:○ Certified ○ Surrendered ○ Suspended ○ Revoked

How to think about a USDA Goal Slide 2

● To figure out how to analyze your site, you need to determine the specific action that represents success

● To that end, the action of clicking into the Organic Integrity Database represents a specific action that USDA believes infers success - their audience is using the tool that they built for their audience.

● Let’s visually look at this flow

USDA traffic enters the “Certified Organic” Topic section of the site

Traffic clicks on “Getting Certified Organic”

DAP empowers you to track this interaction using an outbound link event:

Event label = /integrity/Certifiers/CertifiersLocationsSearchPage.aspx

Which then leads to this flow

What if people go directly into the Organic Integrity Database?

Ok, so how do we need to report on this?

Let’s walk through how to think about this. Let’s review:

● Google Tag Assistant to locate outbound event click● Pulling Event reporting to identify the outbound event click

○ 2,286 event outbound link clicks to the “Organic Integrity Database”● If you want to revisit this type of report quickly , you may want to create a

custom report

So what?

Well, you now can define an outbound link event conversion rate.

Let’s this illustrate in a spreadsheet

The formula is:

Total # of outbound link events (using /integrity/Certifiers/CertifiersLocationsSearchPage.aspx) divided by total number of sessions entering https://www.usda.gov/topics/organic or https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/organic-certification/becoming-certified

Benefit of DAP is that you can understand all the different entry points into any page - whether that \be onsite search, other subdomains, or other pages where specific event can occur

How to calculate conversion rate

Let’s take a look at a spreadsheet

Takeaways

● This is how far we can get you with DAP, but you need to take it from here!● Analysis is hard! But you need to think about this, if you want to increase

this ratio - Look at your marketing mix.● As if it isn't hard enough to figure out a handful of things to influence your

website, try figuring out a handful of things that are going to increase that conversion rate.

Thank you

● Questions?